08 May 2017 3:49 PM

A Few Thoughts on the Outcome of the French Presidential Election

As we digest the very strange French Presidential election (which ended with huge abstentions and, I believe, a record number of spoiled ballots) I thought it might be a good moment to reflect once again on the strange and in my view failed experiment in universal suffrage democracy which has troubled the free and unfree worlds for about a century.

In the free world this has sometimes destroyed freedom. In Weimar Germany a democratically-agreed constitution, employed by a democratically-elected President supervising a democratically-elected Parliament, was used to snuff out liberty in a matter of months. I suspect there are other instances of this, such as the Italian Parliament's passage of the Acerbo Law in November 1923, a law whose only and obvious purpose was to ensure a Fascist majority in the elections which followed soon afterwards.

Of course in the unfree world the difficulties of universal suffrage are made very much simpler by making sure that only one party stands, or that rival parties are bound to lose. In the free world, other ways have to be found to frustrate the popular will - elaborate lies, fiddled statistics, unfair media, advertising, unfair funding, you name it. Even where these things operate, the fact that the result cannot be wholly fixed, and that there are at least two adversarial parties, creates a pocket of liberty in which many good things survive. But that, of course, was the case before we ever had universal suffrage (which only really arrived here in 1950 after the abolition in 1948 of the old University seats).

I’ve discussed this liberty versus democracy problem before, prompted in my mind long ago by a nagging doubt which grew in my mind as I pondered the seeming anomaly of Hong Kong

Note my remarks on the Muslim Brotherhood, rather prophetic for 2007, though I would now (in the light of later research) revise some of my thoughts about Singapore and the Battle of Britain.

I then found that the history of free countries was by no means a story of perfect congruence between universal suffrage and liberty. As usual, what I had stumbled on was not new at all, but an old debate, largely forgotten.

Yesterday(Sunday 7th May) I came across another aspect of this anomaly, in an old programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Pick of the Week’ and drawn to my attention by an later reader:

At seven minutes into this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08p5kym#play you will find the late Alistair Cooke explaining how the USA comes to have an electoral college, which takes the formal decision on who becomes President.

He notes of the constitutional convention which came up with it 'Of all the forms of government they were considering,[in the spring of 1787] democracy was the one they most wanted to avoid'. 'George Washington said : "Accounted by civil societies it [democracy]is the worst and nastiest kind of government"’.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton devised the original Electoral College (of independent and incorruptible , thus wealthy men of virtue and merit) as a precaution against ‘the worst of democracy’s threats, tyranny and majority rule’. Thus was founded the nation now regarded as the world's greatest democracy.

A few years ago, during a BBC Question Time programme, I encountered alarm and scorn among fellow guests, when I mischievously suggested that total democracy might not be a good thing, and said I was pleased that there were restraints on it in our constitution.

These days, now that the Left have been badly bruised by universal suffrage in the EU referendum and the Donald Trump election, I find that I have more sympathy on this subject than I want or need, from people who would once have regarded my opinion as ‘fascist’. ( I should point out here that the USA’s electoral college did *not* play the active restraining role envisaged by Madison and Hamilton in this choice. It just passively let arithmetic do the job. Likewise, the English courts offered the shadow of Parliamentary supremacy, not its substance, when judging Parliament's duties after the EU referendum. Who now dares defy the gods of democracy?).

You might think Emmanuel Macron’s victory (not really a surprise) over Marine le Pen puts an end to all this left-wing moaning about the people's will being pretty awful. But I don’t think it does. Five years hence we will see the whole thing again, and then what?

France’s story is far from over. I cannot see how Emmanuel Macron’s Presidency can be anything other than a failure. He comes from exactly the same elite school as all the other recent failures, he is in fact a strong supporter of France’s EU-loving metropolitan left, which has made such a mess of things for the past 20 years or so, and he largely owes his position to the uncritical support of France’s elite left-wing media, which applauded him into office and savaged his only mainstream conservative rival, Francois Fillon.

Fillon, interestingly, was not part of the French elite of ‘Enarques’, graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s closest equivalent (though a much more tightly-knit group) to studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. A few years at the ENA is generally the precondition for high office for Left and Right alike. Fillon, an unashamed Christian and also a supporter of a rapprochement with Russia, was not supposed to win the Republican primary against Alain Juppe ( an Enarque) . I am fairly sure that this was why Fillon was destroyed by scandals of the sort which are overlooked in most French politicians. Had the more conventional Juppe been selected by the Republican Party, , I also wonder if Emanuel Macron would have gained the approbation of the French media.

Macron, though he has been a Minister (for economy and finance) in a Socialist government and worked very closely (as deputy secretary general of the Elysee Palace staff) with the outgoing Socialist president Francois Hollande, is officially non-party. Now what will he do? He has no party in the National Assembly, so he will need to pay his debts to the Socialists and others whose support he must have to run any kind of government. This does not seem to give him very much freedom of movement, even if he has any serious plans to change anything fundamental.

Ms le Pen has meanwhile seized , probably permanently, a large chunk of the old Communist and Socialist vote, and allied it to rural conservatism. If she were not burdened with the squalid associations of the French right, she would have got much further. I should say here that this is a genuine problem. French anti-Jacobin conservatism, tested during the Hitler era, mostly failed that test. It was already tainted by its Judophobia and injustice during the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish army officer was wrongly convicted of espionage for Germany, and the French right sided with the injustice because of its strong Judophobic tendencies. But its support for Petain was far, far worse than mere stupidity and injustice. The Vichy state’s enthusiastic adoption of anti-Jewish measures (more than the Nazis asked for) remains the irremovable stain on that part of the French Right.

Marine le Pen was born into that part of the French Right, and so was her party. The years cannot wipe away the problem. Her father’s crass opinions are well-known. She has, reasonably, denounced him and distanced herself from him. But I cannot see how she can ever escape from that ancestry, though she is obviously trying very hard to do so, denouncing her own father and distancing herself from the Front National in the final stages of the poll.

Assume this is sincere, as it is only fair to do, and you are still left with a movement stuffed with apologists for Vichy, or people who at best want to avoid the subject of the Jewish roundups or claim they were not really the actions of a true French state. Countries that have been occupied by Nazis are countries in which patriotic conservatism is all too often tainted by the war years (see also Belgium, especially Flanders)

And yet it is that movement which has now won a near-monopoly of French discontent with the failures of the 5th Republic, the evaporating jobs, the mass unemployment among the young, the stifling bureaucracy and regulation, the petty crime, the stagnant economy, the increasing submission to an almighty Germany, and to an almighty USA, the uncontrolled immigration and the unassimilated Muslim minority.

Unless Emmanuel Macron really does have some brilliant plan for coping with all these difficulties, Ms le Pen (or someone like her), and the Front National (or something like it) will be waiting for him five years hence, bigger, more discontented, more experienced. Its day may well come.

And here’s the problem. Under universal suffrage democracy, there has been a collusion between leaders and voters for a long time. We, the voters, have pretended to believe that our chosen party will liberate us from our woes, make genuine and profound changes for the better in our lives. They have pretended to do so. In truth, for many years, they have not fulfilled their promises, and we have not really expected them to do so. But in the long calm prosperity that endured from 1950 till about 2000 it didn’t matter very much.

Now it does. That prosperity is evaporating. How will we afford homes? Where are the secure jobs? Will our children end up as coolies, toiling in sweatshops for pittances like their Chinese coevals? Will anyone be able to afford to retire? Can the welfare state, which we have grown used to, survive? Will we be replaced by robots, or by a new immigrant from the Middle East? Will the annual holidays we have taken for granted still be affordable? And what about these wars of choice our leaders keep starting? Nothing, large or small, looks secure. And so the ‘we’ll pretend to believe your promises’ arrangement is breaking down.

Worse, what I have long regarded as the idolatrous false religion of politics, under which governments took over from God as the object of petitions and the main source of bounty, is actually collapsing. It is morally unsustainable. The voters, repeatedly deceived by false election pledges and having had their hopes repeatedly raised and dashed, now assume not only that they are being lied to but that their leaders are mostly in it for the money.

They see the enormous fortunes amassed by the Clintons and by Anthony Blair since they left office, they see that Barack Obama, for a single speech to a Wall Street concern, can be paid as much as he earned in a year as President of the USA, and they feel a righteous disgust.

When Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, he had nothing to live on but his old U.S. Army pension of $112-56 a month, earned during his World War One service. Had it not been for some property inherited from his mother, and a book deal modest by today's standards, he would have had to seek welfare payments to survive. It was only after this that an official US presidential pension ( now about $200,000 a year) was introduced. Most British premiers likewise went off into modest retirement. Not any longer. (I make a strong exception here for Gordon Brown, who, as far as I know, passes his speaking fees to charitable bodies) .

I think the contract between rulers and electors which has sustained universal suffrage democracy for the last century or so is breaking down. It was fundamentally cynical. At its highest level it involved people agreeing to be bribed with their own money, and of course with the money of others too. Now that money has run out, the bribes are dwindling and the promises have to be vaguer and more poorly costed, or they just have to be broken(like the absurd Tory pledge on limiting immigration, a zombie of a promise, which still grimly walks the earth long after it ought to have been buried six feet under).

It ends with the election of Donal Trump in the USA, an election which can’t and won’t deliver what it promised. What then? How will the illusion of choice be preserved at the next US presidential election? Likewise the presentation of leaving the EU as a simple, swift act, which somehow took hold during the referendum. And now, the growing shadows around the French Fifth Republic, which surely cannot survive in this form much longer?

Perhaps we will end up with the German system, where they have elections but the same group of people always end up in office with the same policies, and nobody can be in the government until he or she has already been in the government. But would anyone but the Germans, once described by John le Carre as having quite a bit of democracy but not many democrats, put up with this? Or perhaps we will wonder afresh why we ignored the wisdom of the ages, and took this strange route in the first place.

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I eventually concluded that the ties between state and big business created virtual monopolies, which were, in effect, exactly the same kind of state monopolies that existed under soviet communism. Cronyism, or what might be better defined as fascist economics inevitably collapses in on itself for the exact same reasons that communist economies do, it just happens at a reduced pace because the state does not suddenly nationalise all the means of production.

In effect, monopolies of any kind can't and don't work, they are like huge icebergs around which the moving water of capitalism chills to the point that it risks becoming frozen and stagnant. QE money printing is a mechanism of desalinisation which eventually destroys the capacity of the water to resist the freezing. Then all is stagnant ice.

This is how the Wests experiment with whim and subjectivism will end; when it no longer produces things because it no longer has the capital nor a stable money. The West only thrived because of reason, not because of democracy, we grew strong because we gave up worshipping whims and mysticism concentrating on profit making, property and production in a society which broadly accepted the principle of Liberty under law. Once we lose that engine of growth it's game over. We will be at the mercy of any barbarians wishing to exert their force-and by then I expect there will be people who will see a barbarian hoarde as a far better opportunity than a Western government and its cony special interest globalists businessmen.

Bill .
A compass and a six figure grid ref and the correct map for your location . Or some knowledge of where you might be .
Is mao reading or orienteering without the aid of sat navs still practiced ?

Will Kelly | 13 May 2017 at 05:35 PM :
*** I would find it very hard not to be convinced that there is some done deal between the great capitalist powers and Saudi to reshape the world to create a massive profit making corporate workhouse machine manned by docile and programmed populations... held in place by the whip of Islam.***

Deal done in the 1970s with the Saudi despots whereby US petrodollar/$ "reserve currency" status is preserved. Without which, the prodigiously indebted USA would be bankrupt and its imperialist establishment overthrown. The fall of empire....
In return for facilitating and supporting the corporatist Neocon agenda, the rulers of Saudi Arabia are protected.
Worldwide, there's effectively only one basic economic model approved or permitted, thanks to "treaties" and supranational organisations such as the IMF and World Bank, plus corporate-bought politicians with their cultist assertions about alleged "free markets" (which certainly aren't).
And now there is Saudi financing of the construction of wahhabist-controlled mosques throughout Europe, and the spread of "IS" and related jihadists to countries such as Indonesia and Malaya.
What better way to disruptively preclude the formation of any benign alternatives to the debt-entrapment and looting as inflicted by the globalists' economic system?
Thus, the dictatorial globalist agendas of Neocon ideologues and Saudi theocrats would very much appear to have a synergetic relationship; a thoroughly rotten inter-dependency deep enough that the defeat of one could well bring down the other.

Henry L'Eplattenier | 14 May 2017 at 01:58 PM :
**** - Freedom of speech is not synonymous with the freedom to use somebody else's internet platform to express an opinion.***

You see no contradiction, hypocrisy and danger in the fact that they (in this instance the Guardian) claim it exists, claim to approve of it, even self-righteously criticise other countries for allegedly not having it --- and then proceed to enthusiastically censor views for no evident reason other than that the editorial staff don't happen to agree with them, or they cite inconvenient data.
That for-example newspaper propagandises and agitates on behalf of a particular set of agendas in government. Are you equally approving when a government -- with their approval, and partially reliant on enablement via mass-media in general -- subsequently inflicts the same censorship to safeguard its own disinformation, despite still eulogising about "freedom of speech"?

From your 2007 article. "..In the USA, there is of course the Supreme Court, America's liberal House of Lords, which is in charge of social and moral legislation and has a very sketchy relationship with the ballot box. There are also the many one-party cities, where there is no serious chance of a change of local government, and the bosses have a lot of influence over how the national vote goes in their state." As an American, this statement is so true, Mr. Hitchens. So very, very true.

Ref: David Taylor . In the meantime , Saudi Arabia is close to cutting off Yemens food supplies and are seemingly intent on provoking war between the West & Iran , on their behalf , all contained in our hosts friend & colleague ....... should that matter not be nearer the top of the News reports ?
Good question. And one should consider why this matter is hidden away and also whilst the Western nations bend over backwards,draining their resources with funding and also taking in refugees, as a matter of conscience, to provide humanitarian relief to Yemen and other countries on and close to the borders of the worlds arguably richest nation Saudi Arabia which does? NOTHING. I would find it very hard not to be convinced that there is some done deal between the great capitalist powers and Saudi to reshape the world to create a massive profit making corporate workhouse machine manned by docile and programmed populations... held in place by the whip of Islam. If anyone has doubts about this. I ask them to take a walk a round UK cities and see the boarded up/converted churches (or the ones that survive having a handful of congregation for the Sunday services) and then see the mosques flourishing ( with financial support which would be refused to Christian Churches) and sprouting up all over the place making some areas come to a standstill for the Friday prayers. This has all come about since 9/11, an atrocity which one would have thought served as an urgent warning to us, but what happened? We have went on the road to accommodating, cow -towing and surrendering our own values in place of a backward medieval system which has little respect for human dignity or modern civilised society. I don't think this all can be by any small accident and has been a deliberate act/plan specifically designed by some powerful political groups.

- "C. Morisson writes: "Free speech ceases to exist once political correctness has been imposed. Which includes "positive discrimination", objection to which is not permitted. Surveillance and punishment against speech or even thought crime intensifies.... With such ideologically-driven impositions, does democracy itself continue to exist?" - "Incessantly repeating this kind of nonsense does not make it true. In fact the very fact that this contributor is free to write what he/she writes, is itself proof that the statement has no basis in reality." -
Posted by: Henry L'Eplattenier | 12 May 2017 at 01:11 PM

Accordingly there is free speech everywhere and everyone is free to express themselves as they so wish without let or hindrance, censorship, offence, arrest, prosecution, public criticism, censure, calls for dismissal, no-platforming, death threat (some remember when Salman Rushdie was the only one under that death threat), police protection, or actually murdered - in what reality?

Manufactured Consent .
I had not heard of that , it makes sense though . possible examples , the acres of newsprint and miles of video , used to discuss , a 96 year old mans semi retirement , Miss Abbots inability to memorise figures , Tim Farrons private beliefs , fox hunting , smoking bans , potential drug legalisation , a reality tv stars boyfriends antics in a nightclub .
In the meantime , Saudi Arabia is close to cutting off Yemens food supplies and are seemingly intent on provoking war between the West & Iran , on their behalf , all contained in our hosts friend & colleague , Mr Cockburns reports , should that matter not be nearer the top of the News reports , not on a web based paper with a small circulation ?

Henry L'Eplattenier | 12 May 2017 at 01:11 PM :
*** - Incessantly repeating this kind of nonsense does not make it true. In fact the very fact that this contributor is free to write what he/she writes, is itself proof that the statement has no basis in reality.***

Your statement is indicative of your own blinkered ignorance, or worse.
There are two styles by which censorship / prohibition / opinion control can be applied. One is the rather overt type as practiced by regimes that don't mind being seen as dictatorial.
The other type is more subtle; it is designed to project an illusion of freedom, information access and uncensored communications. Though forelock-tugging system sycophants and persons of naive disposition do mistake that for real freedom, below the facade it can be more successfully manipulative in many aspects than blatant and thus more readily distrusted dictatorship.
Just part of what Chomsky called "manufacturing consent"....
Have you not noticed the uniformity of mainstream mass-media reporting, the media's increased reliance on a few international news agencies, their often unquestioning and uniform regurgitation of government or corporate press releases (though not always indicated as such) as though these were independent reports?
Have you not noticed what happens to whistle-blowers nowadays?
Or to potentially regime-threatening dissidents (for instance, Dr Kelly)?
Have you not even noticed the huge increase in the corporatist State's use of spin-agencies and consultants of various types as compared to decades ago?
Or that there is actually now a (UK) government "nudge" unit?
You claim I am free to write what I want?
Well, no -- it may be that I'm not. But if I did write something and it was censored, you'd simply never know, would you?
Go check what little remains of reader comment on articles in the online Guardian ... ironic that one of the most heavily censored discussions I've seen there was a few years ago -- on the topic of censorship. Extreme (and notably biased) censorship was imposed by the BBC on discussions on its general election website in 1997. Do you regard these media organisations as bastions of free speech and opinion?
That's what they still pretend to be.
All of the above mentioned could be even before any legalities (or changes thereof) are brought into consideration. Political correctness, increasingly enforced by law, is very much a control mechanism, concocted to promote a particular agenda and its assertions, while prohibiting and suppressing free discussion of -- or any serious objections about -- that agenda.

going in circles when you think you are going straight , it is something to do with the length of your legs , like your feet , they are not a perfect match , one is longer than the other , I read that in a book , cannot remember which book . Not at all sure it is true , it is a plausible thing to propose .
Going in circles can be avoided , with a good compass .

The problem is that the odd are completely stacked against anyone trying to run as an independent candidate for Parliament, unless they had a TV career, like Martin Bell ****PH: That's not what did it for Mr Bell. Labour and the Lib Dems *both* withdrew in his favour. Most independents don't get that boost. Why don't people know this?****
Once elected MP's, most of what they promised and the remainder, if it proves too difficult to deliver (assuming they meant it in the first place) is spun away. Most of those elected have never actually run anything or had a proper job.

Then there are the vested interest groups. On the Tory side - pay £50,000 a year and you can belong to to a group that gets to meet Cabinet Ministers or even the Prime Minister. On the Labour side, it is paying back in some way the financial support of the unions

The certainty is that you are the one that ends up paying for it all in some way.

From memory I seem to recall Tolstoy also wrote some wise thoughts about the dangers of nationalism.

Whether such thoughts will be recognised by the National Front in France should they decide to follow their leader's advice and look for a new (less contentious?) name might soon be revealed. It might, of course, simply be a ploy to reduce exposure of the hard core Right that made up much of their earlier membership.

C. Morisson writes: "Free speech ceases to exist once political correctness has been imposed.
Which includes "positive discrimination", objection to which is not permitted.
Surveillance and punishment against speech or even thought crime intensifies....
With such ideologically-driven impositions, does democracy itself continue to exist?"

- Incessantly repeating this kind of nonsense does not make it true. In fact the very fact that this contributor is free to write what he/she writes, is itself proof that the statement has no basis in reality.

It is Descartes who said (i think) when lost in a forest, go in a straight line, and Molloy, in Samuel Beckett's novel of that name, who,when lost in a forest, having heard that when man thinks he's going straight in fact goes in a circle, attempted to go in a circle, hopng in that way, to go straight (failing in both if memory serves).

Tolstoy, ”also described prime ministers and presidents as 'cunning, immoral, and artful mediocrities' with parliament being 'an instrument to cheat the people in that it deceives them into thinking it truly represents them’".

It reminds of the Ring verse of J.R. R. Tolkien:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie

I have not read any book dealing with Tolkien and the War(s), but I would like to do it sometime.

Tolstoy said that that 'representative government and universal suffrage resulted in every possessor of a fraction of power being exposed to all the evil attached to power' and that 'the only government in which I believe is that which exercise a moral authority'. He also described prime ministers and presidents as 'cunning, immoral, and artful mediocrities' with parliament being 'an instrument to cheat the people in that it deceives them into thinking it truly represents them'.

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